Michael Sailstorfer, High Ranking Visit - Cologne, 2009 @museum.de

What is the helicopter doing on the roof of the building that houses the Foundation of the Sculpture Park Cologne? Even if the plane doors open immediately and a high-ranking visitor, the title of the work, gets out? Michael Sailstorfer (*1979 in Velden), sculptor, installation and object artist, lives in Berlin and is featured on the “List of 100 Heads of Tomorrow”, an evaluation of his creativity. He became known with a work from 2005 in which a hanging, rotating automobile tire scraped along a wall, vainly wearing itself down without being able to move from the site and sending out a penetrating odor. In the Sculpture Park, Sailstorfer has replaced the helicopter’s engine, a SE 3160 Alouette 111, with a muted electric motor, has screened it off like a state carriage and painted its metal skin white, the windows black. Should the rotor be turned on, an uncanny atmosphere is produced. You hear nothing: no ear-shattering noise as you would expect. Are we in the middle of a dream? Or in a mute flashback of a film? Sailstorfer manages to unnerve us and directs our attention to the fluent and permanent transition that all things are unavoidably subject to.

(Audio: Text by Marta Cencillo-Ramírez)

Michael Sailstorfer

High-Ranking Visit - Cologne, 2009

Helicopter, paint, electric motor

Courtesy Johann König, Berlin